If u saw me post this before, no u didnt

A unecesarry long analysis of Tom psychology based on one quote (i’m also gonna go into headcanonland a bit, so)

English isn’t my native language and i suck at explaining so FOLLOW ME (pls)

I find this single sentence from teenage Tom Riddle always so interesting. Although his relationship with his mother can be analyzed here as well, I want to focus on his father.

The language he uses is interesting in this scene because he does not say that his mother was abandoned or that his father left his mother. He says that HE was abandoned. His mother is entirely passive. He doesn't connect his father's leaving to his mother, it's HIM who the father chose to leave. While leaving a pregnant wife does suggest abandoning the unborn child as well, Tom Senior fled specifically because of his wife. Tom Senior's action was of Merope, yet Tom bypasses her to frame himself as the primary target, and only target of abandonment.

Tom is twisting this event because it serves as a projection of his own experience. But what is he projecting exactly? He gives a hint at the second part of the sentence: the reason was that she was a witch. This detail is importand, as magic is a significant aspect of Tom’s character and he projects his own experiences onto his mother’s fate. What he believes happened to his mother, who is disliked for possessing magic in his imagination, mirrors his own experience growing up in the Orphanage. Tom’s Magic led the other children and authoritative figures to perceive him as odd, insane, mad and therefore scary and frightening. All descriptions are charged with negative connotations that cause others to distance themselves as he is something dangerous and best avoided. Even if Tom didn’t have a name for it before Dumbledore arrived, he recognized that this thing, this something that set him apart from others, was wrong. Rather than elevating his status, it had the opposite effect. He became less desirable than before he started using magic. People started to distance instead of noticing him.

This created a profound personal wound within Tom, and to cope with this injury, he convinced himself that this "wrongness" made him special (also to challenge the group identity common in these facilities by creating his own individual identity, but that's not relevant for this projection). He could do things only found in fantasy books, stories, and legends. He was something mythical. And if you are something mythical, then the opinions of non-mythical people and the names they call you no longer matter. This coping mechanism sustained him until he was 11 when his uniqueness was confirmed. However, despite this validation, years of internalized shame meant he already ingrained in him that his magic made him “wrong” in the eyes of Muggles, leading to inevitable rejection out of his control and rendering him a passive victim.

He claims this is what his father did and believes it explains what happened to his mother after he discovered her magical heritage. He projects his own experiences of social rejection due to his magic onto his father. His Muggle father is no different from the Muggle children who kept their distance from him. Instead of allowing this internalized shame to surface, he constructs a grand narrative that his and his mother's magic was simply too overwhelming for Tom Senior. He convinces himself that Tom Senior recognized his superiority, leading to his departure. In doing so, Tom reclaims his agency because rather than being a passive victim with no control over being socially rejected, like orphan-Tom, he convinces himself he was an active threat, like Voldemort-Tom, that he himself FORCED the other person to leave. HE was in control in a situation although in reality he was in fact powerless (he does that later too to the other children in the orphanage). He was simply too extraordinary for the common Muggle.

There is another dimension to the word “abandonment”. The word itself is a strong and charged term, especially for something he didn’t personally experience in the literal sense from his father, but which resonates deeply with his subjective experience of neglect. It evokes images of something or someone left behind, forgotten, completely given up, and neglected. Consider an abandoned car, for instance, which begins to decay, corrose, rust, and become dirty due to it’s environment. It mirros Tom’s subjective experience in the Orphanage. He is left to rot in the commoness of Muggles who percieve his magic as a defect. In such surroundings his magical essence is decaying and he himself is starting to wither the longer he remains there.

Perhaps he hopes that one day his family comes to rescue him from this place that makes him corrode, rot and decay (or he will find them). It’s not uncommon for orphans to fantasize about their families. Tom likely spent time dreaming that his biological family was as special and unique as he is which ties into his need for external validation of his own uniqness (general concept of a family, then possibly his father's side, then definetly the Gaunts). Little Tom doesn’t have to necesarilly firmly believe he has a living family. He might be aware that his family might not exist due to the lack of evidence, yet he indulges in the fantasy and dreams whenever he sees a family on the street, in the media, or in books, igniting his envy and want of a familial connection. This might occur even when he fails to convince a married couple to adopt him. It's another coping mechanism. It soothes him.

However, the dream of having a family stopped being the source of recognition and validation of his uniqness specifically once he discovered the wizarding world, with Hogwarts taking its place. But that doesn’t mean his longing stopped for a family that could save him from this rotten place. Now, in the wizarding world, he searches for the family he once idealized, assuming his mother was a Muggle and his father was magical. The reality was the opposite, forcing him to confront the fact that his magic doesn't spare him from the common fate of Muggles. And that his father isn’t this powerful wizard (like him), the more u idealize the more painful the disappointment is going to be. And he had this image in his mind for YEARS. He doesn’t have a reason to believe his father can save him, why would a Muggle save him? All Tom experienced from them was the opposite. He must have abandoned him just like every other Muggle ever did.

(Note: someone feeling abandoned / think they got abandoned doesn’t necessarily mean someone else left them physically. A perceived rejection can also be interpreted as being abandoned)

Now that only leaves the gap, why was his father not seen with his mom? He must have left her. What reason do you as a muggle have to leave a witch/wizard? Right, of course, magic! He simply feared the magic.

Another intriguing aspect to observe in this sentence is Tom's shift from his perspective, using "my mother," to adopting his father's viewpoint, referring to "his wife," while talking to Harry. This linguistic maneuver is intended to place Harry in his father's position, forcing him to agree with Tom's view of his father's coldness: not only for abandoning a "mother," but for leaving his own family, his "wife.", his own union. The aim is to elicit empathy and sympathy from Harry, leading him to agree that the father is at fault, not Tom. Tom seeks external validation to affirm that the rejection is not due to Tom’s magic (his “wrongness”) but his father's. A validation he cannot provide for himself internally.

Later, he seizes complete control of the abandonment narrative by killing him and corrupting his appearance with dark magic. By replacing his name with Voldemort and altering his appearance to look distinctly different from his father (and everyone else really), he erases the last evidence of their shared commonness. Now, he can no longer claim to have been abandoned as Tom actively takes measures to reject his father in return.

(Without sounding like a broken record, i just need to address this too because it's fascinating. Notice how Riddle keeps the "I" separated right before he speaks about his father? He creates linguistic distance between himself and his father even in his grammar. It reminds me how royals speak "I, Mr. King, hereby declare". It's formal, elevated and self-important. Next, he is devaluing his father with words like "fool" and "common." Tom communicates he is a powerful while his father is weak and ordinary common, he is showing Harry that he is superior to his father. But then the power shifts suddenly to his father the moment he admits he was abandoned? How does a common man abandon a powerful? It doesn't make sense again. For a short moment, reality threatens his self-concept: "I am special. I am unique. I am powerful." Now he is stressed, its creates a very uncomfortable feeling. He has to correct the slip because he can’t accept the reality yet. And he does by explaining "Well, it was only because I have this very powerful thing called magic! “ All good, he is on the throne and his beliefs about himself are true again!)

In our fandom, Tom Riddle is a romanticized character. Even in dark and macabre fics, his most unattractive qualities aren’t really showcased, and when they are, they’re usually portrayed pretty favorably. Now obviously there’s nothing wrong with reinventing and redefining characters—imo, you definitely should. But just for a bit of fun, I put together a list of less-than-sexy canonical traits that make him more dynamic, complicated, and interesting to read imo. (Inspired by this post.) 

1. He’s a compulsive thief — and not only when he wants something for a specific purpose. His character is constructed around pathological emptiness and longing for esteem (rooted in childhood poverty and neglect). When he steals from the other orphans, it’s not because he has any grand plans for these items—he wants to have these things simply so that they cannot. 

As he gets older, this “magpie-like tendency” evolves into the defining flaw of his Horcrux ambition. Had he chosen simple, unassuming objects, he could have been invincible. But the language used to describe him — “hungry” (CoS) and “vacant” with “empty hands” (DH) — shows that there’s something more to this error than mere stupidity or ego or blind ambition. It’s about the conflict between spiritual/emotional needs and material desire, where he is Rowling’s hollow and grandiose foil to Harry’s prevailing moral goodness. 

2. He is shamelessly parasitic. There are three strong literal cases of this (1) Quirrell; (2) snakes and critters in Albania ; and (3) Harry himself. But then it doesn’t end there. He physically depends on Wormtail to wean him like an infant using the ‘milk’ of a Maledictus to whom he later knowingly consigned a piece of his soul. 

Yes, Dumbledore does say that Tom Riddle is a highly self-sufficient and independent child—this obsession with autonomy, however, is more of a self-delusion than a reality. He is the most dependent character in the series. He rends himself so many times, his soul itself is unstable without reliance on bodies both inanimate and conscience. And he doesn’t mind this because his obsession with self-reliance is about detaching from that which he considers weak—human love and friendship. Coerced servitude and allegiance, on the other hand, are qualities he values immensely. 

3. The child Tom Riddle is not sophisticated. This is actually the only fandom habit that does annoy me personally. Really often kid!Riddle is given this rich and colorful vocabulary and aristocratic bearing. This change completely misrepresents his class origins and is pretty inconsistent with his behavior in HBP. Take his line to Dumbledore for example: “I don’t need you. I’m used to doing things for myself, I go round London on my own all the time.” He does not say: “I don’t require your company. I often walk through the city on my own.” And yet I can promise you, you will encounter a lot of that bloated, hyper-mature dialogue in fics. 



Now sure, if you change his upbringing, this becomes irrelevant. Just note the subtle and powerful difference between a child who, unrefined, has an advanced grasp of manipulation and coercion – and – a child who mysteriously sounds like the Queen even though he’s a poor orphan raised in working-class 1930s London. 

4. He has poor impulse control. I’ve gotten into arguments about this one but hear me out. Riddle is undoubtedly intelligent, strategic, and cautious… However, he is not rational. Dumbledore is rational. He relies on impersonal calculations to plot and ploy. Riddle does not. He acts on desire and satisfaction, and calculates maximum efficiency of these things so that he can achieve his only goal: material immanence and domination. 

It was not rational of him to slaughter his family; it was not rational of him to unleash the Basilisk; it was not rational of him to strike Harry with the Elder Wand. He did these things to satisfy an immediate thrill – to get revenge, to acquire the admiration of his thug gang, to kill Harry. He doesn’t anticipate the consequences of his actions and therefore makes foolish errors that even an ordinary and unexceptional person would be capable of avoiding. 



(Notably, deficient fear conditioning is one of the defining qualities of criminal psychopathy.) 

5. He is kind of funny? Far from being humorless and austere, we can gather from a few moments in the text that Riddle/Voldemort has a subtle and vindictive sense of humor. He tells Wormtail that he’d be used for a task that many of his followers would give their “right hands to perform” (GoF). He mocks the Blacks for having their blood mixed with a werewolf and everyone laughs at them (DH). He also laughs hysterically at his own cruelty at many points, such as during Ginny’s manipulation (CoS). 

I’d like to make a case for it.

My UK friends, correct me if I’m wrong, but didnt Tom Riddle grow up in a poorer part of London? Wouldn’t this mean he’d have a different dialect to his accent? Now imagine Tom Riddle getting made fun of for this and for the lack of education. He’s sorted into Slytherin. He has ambition in spades. I’ve always believed that Tom Riddle would have worked his ASS off to get rid of his old self.

Tom is also bit of a peacock. He would absolutely expand his vocabulary, alter the way he spoke, get rid of a working class accent to shake off the chains of his previous life. He’d use it to appear better than others. We see some of this higher class speaking in Chamber of Secret.

I do absolutely believe that, after the initial shock of his first meeting with Dumbledore, Tom was working his ass off to mold himself into someone who could rise up in wizarding society.

Before that, he was definitely rough around the edges… Although I will say that, in the brief scene we see him in at 11, while he isn’t particularly sophisticated in speech (and definitely not in manner), neither does he show any obvious Cockney dialect markers that we see with other characters such as Stan Shunpike, for example. This tells me that while he IS undeniably impulsive and poorly self-regulated in many regards, he does have at least *some* ability to mask, even then, before he enters the wizarding world… And even in the extremely emotionally charged situation of learning he is a wizard for the first time, that there are others like him, and that he will soon have an opportunity to leave his current environment.

In such a situation, I think most of us would be at least somewhat dysregulated, so I infer from that, that by 11, he has already started practicing polishing his speech, perhaps by emulating books or more sophisticated visitors to the orphanage, even if he has not yet perfected it.

I apologize to Christian Coulson. This is now my all-time fancast for Tom Riddle, down to the lone curl dangling over the forehead. When you filter everything that Tom Riddle says and does through the lens of Clavicular looksmaxxing framemogging brainrot, everything suddenly makes sense.